Mastering the Car Buying Process: Practical Tips for Getting the Best Deal and Avoiding Manipulation at the Dealership

Yeah, be mindful why you even went to the car dealership and keep it in your mirror. Now let’s get into some real tips. Number one, know what you want. If you want a Toyota RAV4, for example, I want you to know everything about this particular car that you could and how much other people are charging. So you can go to cars.com, Carvana, Kelly Blue Book, all of these websites that’ll give you information about the type of car and what the price range should be. So when you go into the dealership or wherever you’re buying the car from, you already know what to expect as far as price. Then don’t let them manipulate you or manipulate the numbers. So a lot of things that I’ll see or have heard when I go into car dealership is what’s your budget? What’s your range? What do you want your car payment to be? They will ask you that. And then what they’ll do is go in the back or go talk to somebody and try to say, okay, what can we do to get this person to a $400 car payment? But what they don’t tell you is $400 for 36 months is not the same as $400 for 85 months. Then ask for what you want. So for me, I know that I wanted a sunroof, a backup camera, I wanted a warranty, I wanted all these different things. If you can’t give me that, then you’re not the person that I wanna be working with. And I told one guy straight up, if you’re not trying to give me a deal, I don’t have no problem going over west and checking with somebody who can. I need someone whose kids are hungry. I need someone whose kids eating pop tarts and noodles and hot pockets for dinner and they want steak tonight. They trying to get that check today. They’re willing to do whatever it is possible to get the deal because that’s just how hungry they are. Don’t seem like you trying to give me a deal, so I gotta be out of here. And that brings me to the last point. It’s okay to walk away. It’s a lot better to walk out of the door and not get something that’s up to your standards or something that you dreamed of and then regret it a few months later or regret it two years later, but you’re stuck in the payment or you’ll have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get out of the deal.